Sensitivity analysis with various parameters in undermoded reverberation chambers

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of measurement uncertainties and the environment characteristics themselves on the desired field uniformity (FU) in reverberation chambers (RCs) by means of state-of-the-art global sensitivity analysis techniques. There are many quantities to describe the FU. The authors attempted to inspect many of the most important ones in two different orientations of the stirrer (horizontal, vertical).

Design/methodology/approach

Surrogate modelling techniques are involved to compute the Sobol’ indices efficiently with a modest number of required electromagnetic (EM) simulations. This can be only achieved if the behaviour of an appropriately chosen output quantity is predictable in such a way, which enables to extract useful information. Therefore, this choice should be made with extra care of the stochastic fluctuations, which have to be as low as possible. To this end, in this paper, various figures of merit are investigated.

Findings

This method can provide useful knowledge in the lower frequency range, where the ideal properties of the EM field in RCs cannot be established, and the importance of the setup parameters can vary from configuration to configuration.

Originality/value

Considering the current research tendencies related to RCs, the application of the method of Sobol’ indices to RCs is unique, which has only been done by the authors of this work so far. The main contribution presented in the paper is the thorough investigation of the effect of configuration parameters on the statistical properties of RCs through many output quantities describing the FU.